the mistake of thinking that the flu epidemic we were about to experience, the famous swine flu, was, you know, a super killer flu because all of the hospital emergency rooms got filled with the severe cases. then it turned out for every severe case you had 10,000 mild cases and all of a sudden we realized we didn t have as bad a flu as we thought. in this incident we have a small number of very critical cases with a very high percentage of death, about 50%. what we don t know is does that reflect the denominator or, you know, is it less severe than we think? and the second is how did they get infected? now, all signs right at the moment are pointing to pigeons. maybe pigeons are the silent carriers harmlessly to the birds of this virus. but we re not sure and nobody has identified a mechanism. how do you get it from the pigeons? how exactly did this happen? you mentioned pigeons but also swine flu and on the subject of swine i m wondering,